In Kirk's example, a spotmeter seems to me the better tool for the job, requiring less interpretation and workarounds.

I'm sure Sandy's method for determining low subject ranges with an incident meter works well enough, but that is not the same as saying it works better than a spotmeter would in that situation.

Jay - I did see that Davis does discuss the use of spotmeters, and I also agree that a spot metering technique should be more accurate, as it is directly measureing the luminance range of the scene, and not estimating it as the incident system would.

I was just curious about how the other half lives when they only have an incident meter when I posed the question.

I do highly recommend the Minolta Flashmeter VI because it can do both incident and reflected metering. And even flash! It can even compare an incident measurement with a spot reading and display the difference in stops. Really neat feature. I love it! (Sekonic also makes a similar meter.)

And since the Flashmeter VI reads in 0.1 stop increments, so you actually could measure SBRs to decimal places, like 7.9 - 4.5 + 5 = 8.4 SBR.

Not that you really need that sort of precision, but you could if you wanted to...